Oppo F7: Display, Design, Feel
At first glance, with its display turned off, the Oppo F7 looks quite unassuming. In fact, even with the display powered on, the much talked about ‘notch’ was not very visible. Only when I switched to a white background was when the notch appeared distinctively. Even though you are aware of the fact that you have seen the notch on the iPhone X, it is still striking to look at. As for the display, the tall 19:9 aspect ratio display is sharp and vivid and had good viewing angles. However, the artificial lighting conditions at the hands-on area at the launch event wasn’t the best place to test the capabilities of the display. We are hopeful of getting a review unit of the Oppo F7 soon.
Oppo F7: Hardware, OS, Software
While we knew that the Oppo F7 is powered by the MediaTek Helio P60 SoC, even at the launch event and the official press release, the company choose not to officially reveal the name of the chipset. Oppo is not the first company to do this. Even manufacturers like Samsung and Vivo is known to do something along similar lines. At the launch event, I was able to confirm that the handset did, in fact, run the MediaTek MT6771 chip (also known as the Helio P60). However, the 20 minutes that I spent with the handset was not enough to do an analysis of the performance. This chipset also houses the Mali G72 MP3 GPU that handles the graphics. I had both the 4GB and the 6GB versions of the handset at my disposal, and both of them felt pretty zippy. There was no lag when it came to animations and transitions. The handsets being brand new, this was quite understandable.
As for the software bit, the handset runs Android 8.1 Oreo right out of the box. As expected, Oppo has customized Android to its liking and calls it ColorOS 5.0. This version of ColorOS features several feature additions like AI Facial Recognition that claims to unlock the phone in under 0.08 seconds. Then there is the new Safe Box function allows the user to hide apps and files to protect any private messages from other third-party apps. ColorOS also comes with a screen capture feature that records your on-screen activities so that you can share it with others later.
Oppo F7: Camera, Imaging
While Oppo was quite forthcoming in revealing that the front camera on the device is a selfie-centric 25-megapixel unit, the company did not officially reveal the resolution of the primary camera at the rear. We were later able to find that the rear camera can capture images at a maximum resolution of 16-megapixels and has an aperture of f/1.8. Again, we were not in an area where there were apt lighting conditions to test out the camera. We will take a closer look at the camera once we have a review unit in the house. Video recording is limited to 1080p resolution only. We did not find the option to shoot 1080p videos at 60 frames per second either.
Oppo F7: Battery, Connectivity
The Oppo F7 comes with 3,400 mAh battery but does not feature any fast charging technology. The device still uses microUSB port instead of the USB Type-C port. In terms of connectivity, the Oppo F7 has dual-SIM 4G LTE support, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and Bluetooth v4.2; it also has a 3.5mm audio jack, and GPS with GLONASS.
Oppo F7: Price in India, Flash Sale Date
The Oppo F7 is slated to go on open sale starting April 9, 2018. A few users, however, will get an opportunity to buy the smartphone a week earlier thanks to a one-time flash sale that Oppo has planned for April 2. This flash sale will be held online as well as offline. The online sale will happen at Flipkart while the offline sale involves the 700 plus Oppo stores across India. In case you are wondering the standard edition of the Oppo F7 has been priced at Rs.21,990 in India while the 6GB version with 128GB storage will set you back by Rs.26,990.
